YouTube Premium’s latest price hike may cost it more than a few subscribers, survey suggests

YouTube Premium is one of those subscriptions plenty of people reluctantly pay for because, once you get used to it, the idea of going back is tough to take. No ads, background playback, downloads, YouTube Music — it’s easy to see why it ends up feeling essential for users, even if you resent the monthly deduction on your bank statement. That’s probably why Google felt able to enact the latest YouTube Premium price increase in the US without losing too many subscribers, but we wondered what the reaction would be. We figured it was worth asking readers whether this was the point where they’d finally had enough.

We did so through a poll. It first appeared in our report on the price hike, which raised the individual plan from $13.99 to $15.99 and the family tier from $22.99 to $26.99. The last US increase was in July 2023, so this one may not have come as a huge shock, but it still would have made Premium harder to justify for some. We later added the poll to our Verizon perk follow-up, since that discounted Premium perk also got more expensive, and in our coverage of Google’s AI Pro offer, which suddenly looked a lot more relevant as a way to soften the blow.

The results of the poll are below, and might be a bit more nuanced than Google and YouTube had hoped.

As the results above show, the biggest response from you in our survey was that you would swallow the price increase, with around 42% of respondents voting that way. Just over 18% said they planned to cancel, and another 9% said they would switch plans due to the hike. 30.6% said they weren’t subscribers.

That last figure is important because it makes the rest of the results look a little rosier for YouTube. However, when you strip out those voters and look only at the figures from respondents who currently have a Premium subscription, the picture changes. Among subscriber voters, 60.7% said they would stick with their plan, 26.4% said they would cancel, and 12.8% said they would switch to a different plan. Combining those last two figures, almost 40% of readers who are currently on YouTube Premium are changing or canceling their plan as a result of the price increase.

That doesn’t sound great for YouTube, especially since the increased revenue the streaming service will get from the $2 bump to the Individual plan is only 14% more. But let’s not be naive here. First, we should acknowledge that our poll was conducted among readers of articles about the price increase, and such stories are much more likely to attract people who feel aggrieved by the hike. That means the voters may not represent a fair cross-section of the YouTube Premium community at large.

Secondly, this is a half-trillion-dollar platform — it won’t just make a business decision like this on the fly and hope for the best. There are probably scores of number boffins at YouTube HQ running numbers much more complex than my back-of-a-notebook example above, which will be based on extensive market research. In other words, YouTube knows what it’s doing. It could have put the price up by just $1, but it opted for $2 because most of you aren’t going to cancel. Maybe you decided you were going to when you read the news, then calmed down and faced the fact that you can’t go back to the unskippable ads.